A senior Apple exec could be jailed in Epic case
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856795
And additionally steam isn’t a walled garden, there is actual choice, and steam goes out of its way to be usable on multiple platforms. Very different situation to the locked down apple ios ecosystem.
Steam is also a monopoly but it doesn't abuse it's monopoly. E.g. impose terms like games can't release on other stores for a lower price &c.
Nothing stopping a competitor from coming in with a superior game store.
People forget there's nothing inherently wrong with monopolies. It's only when they abuse their monopoly position that there's issues.
Steam's customers are game publishers. Steam provides a service to connect publishers to their audience. Their business model is not "takes money from customers in exchange for goods". It is "takes a cut of each sale that a publisher makes on their platform"
Given that there is no real friction for end users to install Epic Launcher or GoG launcher, is Steam really a monopoly to their customers, the publishers?
If Steam tries to muscle a publisher, they can refuse to publish on Steam and still have options. When popular games aren't on Steam, it does seem like people have absolutely no problem installing another launcher/storefront to access it
Look at the massive success of Fortnite, which is only on the Epic Launcher
They could probably lock this hardware down to only allow steam games, but they don't
Valve remains as one of the rare early tech company successes that has not suffered from enshitification the way so many others have. A key to that is that they have found a way to make a ton of money, and their leadership is happy to be very rich without continuing to expand and grow at all costs. If that business model is threatened, I’m not convinced that gamers and game devs would necessarily be better off.
Basically, the current civil court model is 1) go to court with a case 2) demand to read internal memos of the defendants, 3) put people on the stand and walk through everything in these memos.
It is coercion. They want you to settle, or all your personal info goes online.
These are multi billion and trillion dollar companies, they should be held to a high standard.
In addition, Steam happily allows publishers to sell their games on other platforms and does not create 3rd party exclusivity agreements.
Personally I would consider Steam to be absurdly democratic in their distribution model.
Whether 31,000+ constitutes a lot of games depends on your personal definition. You said you'd think there were more, so I'm guessing you were thinking of a bigger number.
AFAIK developers generally don't announce when a game is exclusive to Steam, so that's probably as close to a definitive list as there is. And I don't know how accurate it is, either, as I haven't inspected it.
I assume one of the things that's missing from the list are games that used to be exclusive. E.g., Borderlands 2 was (on PC) exclusive to Steam for something like 7 or 8 years, but it's presumably not on the list since it eventually became a non-exclusive title.
(and I guess Valve first-party titles are a special case of course)
But regardless, the point was that steam features provided vendor lock in. I doubt that is the case for many of thees games. It's likely just that steam is the most popular marketplace.
Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest...
As far as I know; Valve has cut the rate for larger companies.
> Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest...
I do not know what the point of this comment is. We were not discussing if a company is 'safer'. As one US judge said when an Indie game company sued Valve and lost; the 30% rate is common among digital platforms. The point myself and the above poster made was that Valve does a lot more then most platforms that do charge 30%. Myself as a Linux enthusiast is very thankful for Valve for their work on Proton and Mesa.
Oh yeah, because that's totally fair business practices
You can buy and play games on Epic store, it works just as well. It has achievements too. Devs get a larger cut.
Similarly, when Steam launched, its biggest competitor was retail. Studios got paid a % of the wholesale price (after the publisher recovered its costs), which worked out to an average of approximately 10-15% of the retail price for successful games and 0% for unsuccessful games. (Note: this does not include the milestone payments to the studio during the development of the game.)
But markets have changed. 30% may or may not be a great deal anymore. (For KDP, many authors say that the 30% is worth it because the volume of their Amazon sales dwarfs all other-channel sales combined. Some relatively famous sci-fi authors have said that about 90% of the sales of their self-published works were through Amazon.)
I am inclined to agree with you, it feels like rent seeking at some level (middlemen profiting from the work of the creator), but at the same time, there are many moving parts to get product into the hands of customers so I'm not sure what's fair / standard.
(This is separate from the topic of the article, in which Apple prohibits others from looking elsewhere for these services, which sure seems like textbook anticompetitive behavior)
Who cares? We're not selling boxed software. Let me give you a better question: how much would it cost to host a web site and give a payment processor their cut? I can answer that, because I've done it for Pocket PC/WinMobile apps: 7% to FastSpring, or whoever, for payment processing and then web site hosting for, what, a few hundred a year?
30% is friggin' ridiculous. Discovery is non-existent on Apple's App Store, so we are paying for...what? Overpriced payment processing, and some minimal online storage? I don't give a shit that Apple provided a "platform", as Microsoft isn't charging for me to have the privilege of dropping a binary on a Windows box. And for Apple to then turn around and demand a cut every time money changes hands, whether Apple had anything to do with it or not, is just icing on that anti-competitive cake.
If that's the case, it sounds like a very lucrative market, so competition should bring that number down if it's so profitable.
Again, this is a separate question from Apple's anticompetitive behavior, it's solely about whether a 30% cut is itself reasonable or outrageous.
I don't know or care. It's irrelevant.
Edit to add: I thought of ebay as a frame of reference, for which I seem to pay about 15%. So, Apple is twice that.
- taking a large number of small payments from geographically distributed customers (with different tax situations), taking a cut, and producing a simpler bulk income stream to the producer
- having some filter on quality of the products that are offered to the consumer, and providing a low-friction way for customers to exchange money for them
- dealing with refunds, differing methods of payments, discounts, etc. (handling some of the customer nonsense that comes from dealing with the public, in short)
Are there things that physical stores do that an app store doesn't? Of course. But if retail takes a 50% cut and the app store takes 30%, well, that's instructive, isn't it? That sounds reasonable given that they play similar roles but with less "physical stuff" to do. But if retail takes 10% and here we have the app store taking 30%, that's even more instructive and that would support the claim that the app store is "ludicrous". I'm not looking to compare 29% and 30%, I'm evaluating the claim that 30% is an outrageous sum. Outrageous compared to what?
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For the record, it annoys the ever-living hell out of me that ebay keeps taking more and more, but from what I've seen, its competitors are in the same ballpark. Is Apple worth twice that for the app store, probably not. But now we have a frame of reference: it's about 2x ebay, not, say, 10x
Someone will argue that until now the rest of OSes gave us the entire API for free, but I don’t see why charging for the OS API is an invalid way to make money.
And the point of their competitors not charging for the OS API is that it demonstrates that the market value of the iOS API is $0.
But make it free… and now you've suddenly got their attention.
> The second class action accuses Valve, Inc. of using MFN clauses in its contracts with game developers—both big (Ubisoft) and small (Rust)—to maintain its monopoly in personal computer video game sales through its online marketplace Steam as well as stifle competition more generally. The complaint alleges that the MFN clauses cause game prices across online marketplaces to be the same even though stores like the Epic Games Store take a smaller commission than Valve. Rather than pass those savings on to the consumer, the developers must maintain higher prices to remain profitable on Steam.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu...
This is not well known because Valve is somehow untouchable and worshipped so much in the online community like on Reddit and HN that any criticism invites personal attacks, downvotes and flags etc. and is buried, even if valid.
Imagine the uproar if another company that was a monopoly did this. Look at all the comments on here right now and none of those mention it.
Valve will only provide that free Steam copy if the price the user paid is equal to or greater than the price on Steam. This ensures that you can't effectively just sell Steam copies of the game at a lower price than on Steam itself.
That seems more than fair to me. Valve is providing a free promotional item and it has a straightforward limitation designed to prevent abuse.
>Generally, the economics of these 30% platform fees are no longer justifiable. There was a good case for them in the early days, but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee.
>If you subtract out the top 25 games on Steam, I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made. These guys are our engine customers and we talk to them all the time. Valve takes 30% for distribution; they have to spend 30% on Facebook/Google/Twitter UA or traditional marketing, 10% on server, 5% on engine. So, the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990's.
>We know the economics of running this kind of service because we're doing it now with Fortnite and Paragon. The fully loaded cost of distributing a >$25 game in North America and Western Europe is under 7% of gross.
Full email: [1]
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_NC1ZskeN47LHaYJziotbA0sqL...
Unlike Apple or Google app stores, where you basically HAVE to be on there to access the user base, a PC game can be downloaded and played without needing steam.
A lot have their own “stores” like battle net.
Between Steam and Apple I think the case against Apple is generally stronger. Steam has competition on PC, but Apple is an effective monopoly on iPhone software. That said, Apple does more work on each release with quality control and software reviews. Valve is much more hands off on each release, but does secondary work like maintaining Proton.
This just brings up the discussion of what the cut should be. 20%? 10%? 5%? Or maybe the full 30% is necessary? In a healthy market a business like this that has relatively low barrier to entry should be ripe for disruption, but even companies like GOG take a 30% cut. Why has nobody started a competing business that only does a 20% cut? I get that there is customer inertia with Steam, but it seems like nobody is really trying very hard to win customers.
Every major publisher has tried launching their own competitor platform to Steam, some going as far as pulling their games or making them exclusive. Despite Steam simply doing nothing in response, they all essentially gave up and came back except Epic because of the Fortnite playerbase.
Apple/google/valve/etc are providing you a service and acting as a publisher, dealing with a bunch of legal and tax crap you probably don’t want to, and providing testing/rollout/apis/libraries and a lot of other features for you to use.
You can debate all day long if the cost for their service is fair, but you certainly aren’t getting nothing.
In addition Apple obviously has a walled garden, but android has had side loading and alternative app stores since its inception and it’s still not popular, every user wants to just use a centralized place, so every dev releases on the centralized market. Forcing Apple to change their rules may be warm and fuzzy morally, it won’t change the status quo in the slightest.
As many users have also pointed out valve and steam is the last of the publisher storefronts you likely want complain about as they do a ton for the gaming community.
They literally invented smart phones and app stores, and continuously release new hardware with software APIs that enable the apps.
Windows Mobile and Handango[0] would like a word with you.
iPhone was announced in January 2007 and shipped in June 2007.
Windows Mobile literally had a version called "Smartphone 2002" which you should be able to guess when that came out. You could buy a variety of devices in a vertical mostly-screen format running Windows Mobile for years before iPhone was even getting hinted at.
The main thing the original iPhone did for the smartphone market is popularizing capacitive multitouch screens that work well without a stylus.
> and app stores
The iPhone not only launched without an app store, Apple (and Jobs in particular) was famously hostile to the idea of even supporting third party native apps at all, insisting that web apps would be all that the platform needed. They didn't change their tune until October 2007 when they announced an upcoming SDK, it was made available to developers in March 2008, and it wasn't actually released to users until July 2008.
One could make an argument for Linux package managers being an "app store" in the mid-90s, though if you insist on it needing to sell commercial software then the various carrier-specific software platforms for J2ME feature phones starting in the '99-00 timeframe would be it. Carrier-agnostic third-party stores started to pop up a few years later, and the first official one from a phone vendor seems to have been Nokia Catalogs for Symbian S60 in 2006.
Android also had an app store from the beginning, but the launch of the whole platform was delayed long enough that Apple managed to get iOS 2.0 out with its app store before the first Android devices actually shipped.
...and you could use that on Openmoko smartphones before Apple's App Store already.
LOL! Crawl back to your cult
There is a good argument to be made that Apple introduced the modern smartphone (Android switched to multitouch and a virtual keyboard in response to the iPhone[1]) and app store ecosystem.
It is an extraordinary achievement, especially considering the skepticism expressed by dominant incumbents such as Nokia, Blackberry, Palm, etc. in 2007. iPhone would, at best, have less impact than Windows Mobile.
[1] https://simpleprogrammer.com/history-internet-part-15-androi...
I can see why Epic would not want to pay a 30% platform fee to Apple's game store, much like the 30% which they pay to Google Play, Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store for Xbox, Sony PSN Store, etc.
They're also worrying about declining revenues in hardware so they are aggressively shifting to subscription and service fees, to the point of destroying the user experience of the Apple ecosystem. I am almost forced to use iCloud backups because of decades of neglect with offline syncing. Why must I pay monthly for gigabytes of storage to backup my iphone when a single $30 hard drive could do it?
I understand and see the value apple provides in a walled garden. It's not totally useless. It's one of the reasons apps tend to be higher quality in the App Store and the platform is basically free of viruses unlike an "open" platform like Windows. But I also welcome the changes that might make it easier for web based technologies to run freely on iOS.
This is “I could build that in a weekend” mentality. Your data on iCloud is replicated, available via the internet, available 99.99% of the time, etc. If your $30 hard drive fails you lose everything.
The price and being able to use other services is worth debating, but comparing it to “a single $30 hard drive” is disingenuous.
Third, apple did build this feature, but it has become a neglected second class citizen. You can do backups to a mac, but the experience is clearly neglected.
The more we get this, the more dystopian thing will be.
Make the web more powerful is negative.
Is replace a 'wallen garden' with the most lock-down/monopolistic form of computing (the browser).
Is NOT possible to make your own browser. You can't. Make your own APP (from TUI and UP) is doable.
Consider why more companies haven’t gone the way of PWAs – there are a lot more reasons higher than installation ux.
These small ux decisions make of break a feature or pattern. For example we had QR code readers but it didn’t become a thing to have QR codes until Apple baked it into the photos app. Meanwhile QR codes in China proliferated almost a decade earlier because it was baked into the defacto standard do-everything app WeChat.
…Roman could literally be sent to jail for this, with Apple also subject to criminal sanctions."
Unfortunately, that's hardly likely, nowadays the US justice system hasn't the balls to go that far. Everyone knows Apple is too big and powerful to touch other than to wave a feather at it.
These days governance and democracy first and foremost serve the rich and powerful.
Shelf space, physical distribution, and store operations, etc costs money -- but so does bandwidth, security, tech ops, etc of all of these platforms.
Why isn't it ok for a digital store to require a markup to sell?
Another issue with the analogy is that when you buy a PC in a physical store, that store does not continue taking a cut of all software bought on that PC using i.e. unrelated digital stores (but that's precisely what Apple is asking from competing stores in the EU).
Best Buy/CompUSA/Office Depot employees do not scare the customers and block the customers coming to you directly.
These are the few problems of monopoly that Apple so conveniently takes advantage of.
How does Apple scare customers? By giving them a warning about sideloading?
A warning hardly seems monopolistic? Unless I'm misunderstanding your post
The scare part refers to warning dialogs that iOS would pop up if you used a link to an external web browser to collect payments. It would warn you that Apple wasn't running the payments and use scary language warning you about potential fraud, etc. to try to scare people away. They would also demand a 27% fee from developers for collecting money on the web outside apps if users were paying from following that link.
To top it, when the user actually sees that hidden 'link' and clicks on that, the user is put up with a big screen of message that the external website doesn't have security, privacy etc.
Check it yourself in this article by a developer: https://www.macstories.net/news/an-app-store-first-delta-add...
But do they cost the same per unit sold?
> Why isn't it ok for a digital store to require a markup to sell?
It is ok, just not 30%.
And no it's not unbelievable, incredible or any other bombastic phrase to mean the same that lying to a court gets you in serious trouble.